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 The International Year of Astronomy 2009 was officially launched in the UK by Astronomer Royal Professor Martin Rees. In attendance were over 150 astronomers and journalists from around the UK.
The event was held at the Royal Observatory Greenwich and guests were treated to planetarium shows, talks, and tours of the observatory.
Professor Martin Rees' opening address, 18 February 2009, Royal Observatory Greenwich:
The Greenwich Royal Observatory is an iconic location - the appropriate place for British astronomers to launch our Year of Astronomy. We're surrounded by reminders of this country's long and proud scientific tradition. More than that, we're reminded that astronomy is itself an ancient science - the oldest of all, except perhaps for medicine. Indeed I'd claim - at the risk of annoying any doctors here - that it's the first science to do more good than harm: fixing the calendar, advancing navigation, and so forth.
Astronomy has been at the forefront of technology and precise measurement. That was true when this Observatory was founded; it's just as true today. Astronomers use huge and ultra-sensitive instruments - on the ground and in space as well. But technology isn't just a boost for professionals. An amateur with a 6 inch telescope can do many things that would, 50 years ago, have required a large professional telescope.
This is a celebration of science and discovery. But it's a cultural occasion too. People from all cultures - and in all eras of human history - have gazed up in wonder at the same night sky: it is indeed the one feature of our environment that's common to everyone. That's why the campaign for 'dark skies' deserves wide support during this special year. The campaign's spearheaded by astronomers - and we should pay tribute to Bob Mizon for his leadership over many years. But it's not just astronomers who want to experience a clear view of the stars, just as it's not just keen ornithologists who would feel deprived if song-birds disappeared from parks and gardens.
It's indeed a deprivation if young people living in cities never see a dark starry sky - just as it is if they never see any natural countryside. Modern instruments have revealed a vaster and more intricate universe than our forbears envisaged, but astronomy remains accessible to a wide public.
Millions have followed the progress of probes to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and admired images from the Hubble Telescope. Black holes, dark matter and the 'big bang' have entered the common vocabulary. The internet allows scientists anywhere in the world to access and analyse huge digitised data sets. Sophisticated amateurs can tackle projects that until recently were the province of professionals with large telescopes.
Within the last decade the night sky has become hugely more interesting: we're realised that most stars are orbited by retinues of planets. The planets so far discovered are mainly large - comparable to Jupiter and Saturn, the giants of our Solar System; An astronomical highlight of 2009 will be the launch - in a couple of weeks - of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which should be sensitive enough to reveal planets no bigger than our Earth by detecting the slight dimming of a star when a planet transits in front of it.
The quest for alien life is perhaps one of the great challenges for 21st century science. It would have interested Galileo. But it would equally have fascinated the other great scientist whose anniversary we're celebrating this year - Charles Darwin.
It will be a decade or two before we can actually image Earth-like planets-- a firefly next to a searchlight -- using giant arrays in space or the next generation of ground-based telescopes.
We may learn, in the coming decades, whether biological evolution is unique to the 'pale blue dot' in the cosmos that is our home, or whether Darwin's writ runs in the wider universe.
I'm sometimes asked: Does astronomy offer any special extra perspective on our terrestrial lives? I'd like to end by offering some answers.
Astronomers can set our home planet in a vast cosmic context: a backdrop of millions of galaxies, each containing billions of planets.
And we know that every atom in our body was forged in an ancient star somewhere in the Milky way. We are literally the ashes of long-dead stars - the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. To understand ourselves, we must understand the atoms we're made of - but we must also understand the stars that made those atoms.
But there's something else that astronomers can offer: an awareness of an immense future. The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. We're the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution. But most people still perceive humans as the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to me as an astronomer.
Our Sun's less than half way through its life. Darwinian evolution surely hasn't run its course. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's demise 6 billion years hence won't be human - they'll be as different from us as we are from a bug. Posthuman evolution - here on Earth and far beyond, organic or silicon-based - could be as prolonged as the Darwinian evolution that's led to us - and even more wonderful.
To conclude, let's focus back on the here and now. Suppose some aliens had been watching our planet for its entire history, what would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time Earth's appearance would have altered very gradually. The continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct.
But then, suddenly, the pace of change accelerated, as humans came on the scene, and grew in numbers and impact. Agriculture changed the vegetation and forests . The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise anomalously fast, due to burning of fossil fuels. And something else unprecedented happened: small projectiles launched from the planet's surface and escaped the biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around the Earth; some journeyed to the Moon and planets.
If they understood astrophysics, the aliens could confidently predict that the biosphere would face doom when the Sun flares up and dies. But could they have predicted this unprecedented sudden 'fever' - less than half way through the Earth's life.
If they continued to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a final spasm be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself stabilise? And will some of the objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?
Even in this 'concertinered' timeline - extending billions of years into the future, as well as into the past - this century may be a defining moment. It's the first in our planet's history where one species - ours - has Earth's future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life's immense potential.
The more we learn about astronomy, the more we realise that this pale blue dot in the cosmos is a special place. And and that we're its stewards at a specially crucial era.
Science is the one truly global culture, and it is surely a cultural deprivation for anyone - anywhere in the world - to be unaware of the chain of events whereby some still-mysterious "genesis" nearly 14 billion years ago triggered the emergence of atoms, galaxies, stars, and planets - and whereby, on at least one planet, Darwinian selection led to the emergence of creatures able to ponder their origins. We should proclaim this wonderful story to everyone - young and old. Everyone should be aware of our cosmic habitat and our place in it. We should celebrate the technology that's led to these advances.
These are among the goals of the 'International Year of Astronomy'. Let's hope that, through the efforts of people here - and far more throughout the country - enthusiasm for astronomy will resonate widely in schools, the media and beyond. |
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